The problem with public policy schools

Graduates at the John F. Kennedy School of Government toss globes in the air during 2006
commencement ceremonies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. (Chitose
Suzuki/Associated Press)

By James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley December 6, 2013

James Piereson is president of the William E. Simon Foundation and director of the
Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University. Naomi Schaefer Riley is the
author of “The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College
Education You Paid For.”

This fall, Georgetown University announced the creation of a new school of public policy ,
thanks to a gift of $100 million from an alumnus. And in October, the University of New
Hampshire announced that it would use a $20 million gift to launch a public policy school
of its own.

It is easy to understand the impulse behind such actions. “It’s an awfully frustrating time in
the world,” David Ellwood, dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, told us.
“There are large and challenging problems, including climate change, demography, budget
problems, terrorism, extremism and partisanship.” At public policy schools, he explains,
“we think it’s our job to fix these things.” The faculty and students, Ellwood says, “are
united by the principle of making the world a better place.”

But are policy schools making a dent in Ellwood’s long and varied list of problems? The
Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration already lists some 285
such institutions in the United States, and new ones are opening up — but the field as a
whole seems to be having an identity crisis. The schools’ curricula and missions have
become at once too broad and too academic, too focused on national and global issues at
the expense of local and state-level ones. It’s not clear that the schools are preparing their
graduates to fix all that needs fixing.
 “Policy schools used to be much more about how to translate ideas into solutions to public
problems,” says Anne-Marie Slaughter, former dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs and now president of the New America
Foundation. Scholars at policy schools “do extremely important work,” she asserts, but
often, “that’s not work that policymakers read.”

The basic premise behind a school of policy derives from the modern idea of constitution-
making — that wisely crafted laws can shape the character and conduct of citizens.
Philosopher David Hume articulated this view in his 1742 essay, “That Politics May Be
Reduced to a Science,” arguing that while sound administration is crucial in a monarchy,
the structure of the constitution and laws is more important in republican systems, where
individual freedoms and public good come together. James Madison and other American
founders became early practitioners of Hume’s science of politics.

In the 20th century, political science moved from the design of constitutions to the crafting
of policies by neutral experts. Progressive leaders such as John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson
and Louis Brandeis argued that modern industrial society had grown too complex for the
common citizen or the average elected official. It required a new class of public servants to
adjudicate conflicts between business and labor and to serve on boards and commissions
regulating corporate activity in the public interest.

Some of the first public policy schools were founded in the 1930s in response to the
creation of New Deal government agencies. The virtue of these schools is that “they trained
many people who went into government and did good things,” says John DiIulio, who runs
the Fox Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania and was the first director of
President George W. Bush’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives. “They wired the house of American bureaucracy.”

Sizable government initiatives in the postwar era created more demand for such
institutions, which became “an expression of the Progressive idea that bigger government
was better government,” DiIulio explains. For example, he says, “no one had ever built an
interstate highway system before,” and no one knew how to make the federal government
work with state and local governments and for-profit contractors to make it happen. Enter
public policy schools.

The mission of these institutions began to change in the 1970s, when the Ford Foundation
issued multimillion-dollar grants to eight universities, including Yale, Duke and the
University of Michigan. According to Graham Allison, writing in 2006 in the Oxford
Handbook of Public Policy, the new cadre of students needed to be versed in not only
“budgetary cost and efficacy” but also “social equity, civil rights, and quality of life.”
People who were concerned with intragovernmental relations and American federalism
began to seem “old and crusty,” DiIulio says. Now the goals of these schools were to dream
up ways to “make the world a better place.”

Lofty goals have often produced research and teaching that is further and further removed
from the day-to-day operations of government. While the field is so disparate that “it’s hard
to talk about public policy schools as a whole,” Slaughter cautions, she and other school
leaders identify certain trends, including a renewed zeal for quantitative analysis. When
Georgetown President John J. DeGioia announced his university’s new policy school, he
explained that “the availability of massive data to provide new analytic tools have resulted
in an invaluable opportunity for our university.” The new emphasis on big data is
reminiscent of the Progressive idea that if we just gather enough information, the policy
conclusions will be obvious to all.

James Wilburn, dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, worries that too
often, “what gets studied depends on whether there is an available database.” He accuses
economists at policy schools of being “more interested in their models than in the people”
whom public policy will affect.

Many schools have begun to look like a mishmash of the academic departments from which
their faculty members hail — such as political science, economics and sociology. But those
people may have no more or less interest than colleagues from their home departments in
shaping actual policy. Of course, many of these schools draw at least some faculty
members from politicians who have lost elections or wonks whose parties are out of power
in Washington. But such celebrity instructors are short-timers and do little to draw the
academic faculty — which dominate the schools — out of their bubbles.

There is also a certain grandiosity that characterizes the missions of these institutions. With
the exception of certain schools such as the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government,
most schools are concerned more with national and international policy than with local and
state matters. Many of the places that do focus on the latter, DiIulio says, “are not among
the more prestigious.”

It is not that the better-known schools never do local projects. Ellwood told us how
Kennedy School students helped the mayor of Somerville, Mass., remake his city’s
finances with “performance-based budgeting” — measuring how much snow gets plowed,
for example, not how many snowplows are used. Ellwood offered this as an example of
how policy schools have to focus on “management as much as big, bold, creative
solutions.”

But one wonders how many Kennedy School graduates aspire to solve Somerville’s fiscal
problems as opposed to, say, climate change and terrorism? Only 6 percent of the school’s
2012 graduates went into local, regional or state-level government jobs.

To understand how much the trajectories of policy school alums have changed, one need
only take note of a lawsuit against Princeton by the Robertson family. In 1961, the heirs to
the A&P fortune gave $35 million to the university specifically for the purpose of training
people to go into government service through the Woodrow Wilson School. Forty years
later, they found that the school was instead training people to go into a lot of other fields
— from nonprofits to Wall Street. (After a six-year legal battle, an agreement was struck
whereby Princeton retained control of the endowment, which had grown to $900 million ,
but would pay out $50 million to create a new foundation aimed at preparing students for
government service.)
Of course, public-private partnerships are ubiquitous now; public policy isn’t shaped solely
by government staffers but by various sectors and players as well, and it makes sense that
graduates’ ambitions would reflect that. Indeed, Slaughter says that if she were starting a
policy school today, it would offer only joint degrees, so that students could develop
expertise in the various arenas they might encounter in the years ahead. But training people
to be competent in multiple sectors only makes the job of policy schools even more diffuse.

So, what should these schools be doing in terms of training and research? DiIulio suggests
that maybe it’s time for them to return to their roots, teaching students to focus on
implementing policy and making the government we have work better. “These seem like
technical, boring matters, [but] someone has to get under the hood,” DiIulio says. For
instance, he adds with a laugh, “How do you build an IT system for a new federally
financed system of health care?”

Henry Brady, the dean at the University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of
Public Policy, told us in an e-mail that his school has been “quite successful with a real
impact on bringing tough-minded economic and analytical methods into government and
bringing evidence based research into the formulation of regulations and the appraisal of
programs (although politicians often ignore the research).”

That last caveat may prove the most important. Slaughter notes that the research coming
out of public policy schools is “less and less accessible to the lay reader. The jargon has
become more and more specialized.” She says she “doesn’t know anyone in government
who would read the academic journals that policy school professors get rewarded for
publishing in,” and while the “need for translation [for lay readers] is ever greater, the
rewards for translation in the academy are ever smaller.” Indeed, she says, “in many
departments you will be less valued by your colleagues because you’re no longer doing
‘cutting edge’ research.”

If policymakers ignore policy school research or can’t understand it, what can policy
professors and graduates possibly accomplish?

Arthur Brooks, formerly a professor of business and government at Syracuse’s Maxwell

School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and now president of the American Enterprise
Institute, says that students coming out of policy programs are “no match for the trillions of
dollars in unfunded mandates and liabilities,” not to mention the “power of the unions and
the bureaucracies.” Public policy schools “could produce 10,000 graduates a year,” he adds,
“and it wouldn’t hold a candle to the power of those interests.” Asking whether public
policy grads have made a dent in the budget crisis “is like sending 75 Jesuits to China and
complaining that the country isn’t Christian.” Brooks says, “At Maxwell, we were just
trying to train graduates to be good in whatever careers they had.”

It’s probably true that experts are no match for organized interests, from public-sector
unions to corporations, in which case the Progressive idea was bound to fail. Unfortunately,
though, it’s not clear that the policy schools ever fought these battles — or that they are
equipped to do so now.